Another Modern Diamond Twill

Today I received a lovely sample of the cream-colored wool diamond twill Wollstoff sells. A scan of a portion of that sample appears to the left of this post.

The diamonds on this sample are definitely longer than they are wide, giving a good period impression. Each diamond is about a centimeter wide (measured vertically, the way I have the fabric oriented in this picture) and about 1.5 centimeters long (measured horizontally). The fabric, judging from the feel, is a medium weight.

My sample has no selvedges, so I can't determine warp and weft, but it appears to be about 12 threads per centimeter measured vertically.  I'm having trouble distinguishing the threads in the other direction. The sample looks much more authentic when you actually see the fabric, but even so, each diamond is made up of concentric ridges that don't seem, to me, to quite correspond with the historic specimens. Those ridges are quite pronounced, even more so than the similar ridges in the cream-colored Naturtuche fabric. Overall, however, I like the Wollstoff fabric very much; I'm a bit sorry that Wollstoff can't ship to me here in the United States.

Thinking About Female Images In Viking Art

Looking at the Leire statue reminded me just how common it is for women in Viking Age figurines to look as though they have a short narrow cloth covering their bodies from (approximately) waist to mid-calf. The length and width of these apparent aprons are further emphasized (as on the Leire figure) with either horizontal lines across the entire "garment", designs across the bottom edge, or, like the Leire statue, some kind of edging or design along the bottom and (or) sides.

As I thought about it, I realized that the Leire figure is not the only female figure that appears to be wearing an apron. This figure from the National Museum of Denmark, also wears a narrow cloth over her lap that looks like an apron (thank you, Pearl, for bringing this figure to my attention).

But apron-like designs on Viking Age figures of women are not limited to Danish pieces. The famous silver pendant of Freyja found in Götland also appears to be wearing an apron with horizontal trim across the bottom, under her clasped hands and her rows of beads. Some of the other female figures found in various locations in Sweden (i.e., the figure on the far left, and the third figure from the left, in the photograph under the link) show them also.

I'm not completely sure why I didn't focus on this feature of the existing Viking images before. Granted, the only evidence for the wearing of aprons (as opposed to the so-called "apron dress") during the Viking Age comes from Finland and the Baltic. Those finds survived because the Finns and Balts sewed lots of bronze coils onto their clothing, particularly onto aprons, and this had the effect of preserving parts of the apron as well as giving very exact information about its size and about what parts of the body the apron covered while it was being worn. In Scandinavia, where metal trim was sometimes sewn onto sleeve ends and bodices, but nowhere else, it is still possible that similar aprons were worn, but were not preserved for the archaeological record because they bore no metal trim to preserve them.

Nor am I the only person interested in Viking Age clothing to fail to consider aprons as a possible feature of Viking wear. In the years in which I have eagerly sought out and viewed photographs of Viking clothing reconstructions made by reenactors, costumers, and museums, I have found only one who wears an apron with her Viking garb. The accompanying photograph shows her work. Her name is Deborah Lane. I met her through the MedCos mailing list.

Consideration of the apron question may also help to answer another long-standing question about Viking women's clothing; namely, whether Viking women wore belts. Belt buckles rarely turn up in Viking women's graves and, to my knowledge, the only graves in which they have turned up are not in Scandinavia but in Viking-settled areas of England, Scotland, and the islands north of Scotland. Many have speculated that if Viking women wore belts, they must have worn tablet-woven belts, because so few belt ends and buckles have been found in women's graves.

If most Viking women wore an apron supported by a tablet woven belt, like Deborah and the woman at Eura, it would help explain why so little belt hardware has been found. Belts with buckles are usually made from leather, and it would be difficult to use a leather belt to support an apron in the manner of the Eura woman's apron (i.e., wrapping the belt around the body once, catching the top edge of the apron under it, then folding the top edge over that part of the belt before wrapping the remainder of the belt once again and tying it) because most leather belts are not long enough to wrap twice around the body, or flexible enough to hold the apron firmly and comfortably even if they were long enough.  Deborah's recreation, which shows her tablet woven belt holding her apron on in the manner of the Eura woman's apron, illustrates the point, though Deborah has added metal belt ends to her belt (I don't know of any women's graves in the Viking Age where two belt ends but no buckle have been found).

I need to think more about this issue, but an apron ornamented with embroidery, tablet weaving, or some other textile trim might be an appropriate addition to a recreated female Viking outfit.

More Semicircular Cloaks

Tonight, on the Historical Needlework Resources Website, I found examples of three more extant 11th century semicircular cloaks that, because of their richness and provenance, have survived intact.

The "Star Mantle" of Henry II of the Holy Roman Empire is a semicircular cloak with a stretched neck notch like mine.  My last post on this subject featured a different cloak also attributed to Henry (Heinreich) II of Germany.

In contrast, the Mantle of St. Kunigunde, Henry's wife, also has an elongated neck notch, but that neck notch does not have rounded edges; it is a shallow rectangle, with perhaps a slight reverse curve.

Finally, the Coronation Mantle of St. Stephen has no notch at all; it is a simple, if not quite perfect, semicircle.

This confirms my belief that there was no one method for cutting semicircular cloaks in this period; each tailor appears to have done as experience, and (probably) his patron's body prompted. It reassures me that my mantion is of a plausibly period design.

EDIT (4/1/2017):  Added text noting that I'd previously featured a photograph of a different (black-and-white) semicircular cloak of Heinreich II.

Behold! A Mantion!

Several days ago, I finally completed the mantion, or cloak, that is a part of my planned Middle Byzantine costume, but I wanted to wait to post about it until I had photographs. Finally, this weekend, I wore it with the other completed portions of the costume at a science fiction convention, and my husband, Tigger, took the pictures that appear with this post.

The gold tunic I am wearing in the pictures is the same machine-sewn tunic I wore for the pictures of my wool Hedeby apron dress.  It has a keyhole neckline, which is wrong for the costume (Byzantine artwork shows women wearing simple round necked tunics over their collared shifts; such tunics usually had a shoulder slit closed with a small round button). I'm wearing the gold tunic because it was handy, I have yet to start the himation that will be the final component of this costume, and I didn't want to wear the cloak over the Manazan undershirt alone.  The belt is an inkle-woven belt in a "Greek key" pattern that I bought years ago.  The brooch is a reproduction of a Viking design that my husband bought for me in a museum shop in Sweden; I'm using it because it's the right size and shape for the purpose, and I still haven't decided where or how to obtain a brooch with a more period-appropriate design.

Before letting my husband take the rearview picture, I asked him if the veil on my savanion was straight.  He said, "Reasonably."  Against my better judgment, I let him take the picture anyway, without checking.  I thought of asking him to straighten it first, but then figured that if he thought it was already straight, doing that might not make a significant difference. 

In the last photo, I am standing somewhat crookedly--one of my legs is about a quarter of an inch shorter than the other, so I tend to tilt sideways if I'm tired unless I really concentrate on standing straight and place my feet carefully. The photograph represents the cloak's colors pretty well; it really is that blue, though I'm surprised that it photographed so well in a dimly-lit hotel room at night.

Now I truly have no more excuses; I have to cut my pretty green linen and proceed with the himation.  I think it will look much better with the blue mantion than the gold tunic does.

Diagrammatic Comparison of Diamond Twills

While I'm still thinking about diamond twill, I figured that I would post some diagrams of the weave patterns of the Wollstoff's and Naturtuche's twills, since Sanne has so thoughtfully drawn some for me. They might be helpful for people interested in doing comparisons to the "diamond twill" weave diagrams so often seen on web sites and in books. To the left is a diagram of the warp and weft patterning of Wollstoff's wool blend diamond twill. To the right is a diagram of Naturtuche's worsted diamond twill.

Below them both is a standardized diagram of 2/2 broken diamond twill from the Complex Weavers' Medieval Textiles website.

Clearly the Naturtuche worsted and Wollstoff twills are both broken diamond twills. (Though the two-toned Naturtuche twill looks more like the Complex Weavers' diagram than does the fabric Sanne has diagrammed here.)

I am far from expert in thread counting, reading pattern drafts, and other skills associated with weaving, but it seems to me that the Naturtuche and Wollstoff twills have sides of different thicknesses than the "standard" pattern drafts. It also looks as though the Naturtuche diamonds are a bit longer, a bit less like a "square" turned on its corner, than the diamonds in the Wollstoff twill. For that reason, I think the Naturtuche diamond twill looks a little bit more like a period diamond twill. (Which is fortunate, considering that Wollstoff does not ship to the US!) Hopefully, I can gather swatches of diamond twills from the two other sites, the Danish one and the Russian one, and make a real decision whether to buy any fabric, and if so, which one to select.

Another Female Viking Image

I just read a post on the blog called Aardvarchaeology about a silver Viking Age statue that was recently found in Lejre, Denmark. The statue was characterized as a statue of Odin until the blogger, Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist, pointed out that the figure is dressed like a woman.

Those of my readers who know anything about female attire in Viking Age Scandinavia will agree as soon as they see the image. It's wearing what looks like four rows of beads festooned across the chest, a shawl, and what looks like a front cloth, trimmed on the three visible sides. Her hair appears to be tied up in a high bun, but without seeing the rear of the statue it's not possible to ascertain for certain whether the hair is in a bun or is tied back in a high knotted ponytail, as is seen on other Viking Age artworks depicting women.

So here is one more piece of artwork evidence of the appearance of high class female Viking attire. Like all the other artworks (a photograph of one of which is also featured in the blog post), this statue raises as many questions as it answers. But it is consistent with the other artworks, most of which show some kind of narrow decorated garment in front of the lower body. Maybe I will have to accept the "front cloth" as reality after all! Or maybe Viking women actually wore aprons, like the apron documented in the Eura, Finland woman's grave, and there's been no proof of such garments because such aprons weren't trimmed with metal in the manner that the Finns and other Baltic peoples trimmed their aprons and other clothing.

By the way, I recommend Aardvarchaeology to my readers. Mr. Rundkvist writes on a variety of subjects, most of them interesting. I would follow it more often except that he writes about politics a bit too often for my taste.

Naturtuche Diamond Twills

Yesterday, I received the fabric swatches I requested from Naturtuche. They sent me samples of all the fabrics they sell, not just the ones I expressed interest in. However, most of the wools, though very pretty, are not much different from wools I can obtain more cheaply (and with lower shipping costs!) closer to home. So I'm focusing on the diamond twill samples they sent me.

There are three of these: a medium weight wool, with the motif woven with cream-colored and dark brown threads (Product No. 00059); a cream-colored wool worsted (Product No. 00070); and a light-weight linen (Product No. 00030). I have scanned each of these samples with a measuring tape at the bottom to show scale, and the differences are interesting.

Product No. 00059 is the heaviest and coarsest of the three. It is also, so far as I can tell, the most authentic in terms of weave pattern (though all three appear to be balanced twills; period diamond twills were usually unbalanced, sometimes extremely so). I figure it to be about 15/15 per cm, though the actual diamond motifs are much larger than the thread count implies (and in fact are wider than the diamonds in the coarse twill swatch featured in my original post on this subject). Readers can use the scanned images to do their own thread counting, however.

Product No. 00070, the cream-colored worsted, is the lightest and thinnest of the three fabrics. (It is also the one in which I was the most interested because it is undyed). Each diamond motif is about a centimeter wide--much smaller than Product No. 00059, and about the same size as the diamonds on my coarse gray wool swatch.

Finally, Product No. 00030, the linen sample, was a bit heavier than the worsted, but the diamonds were even smaller--about four diamonds on Product No. 00030 fit in the same space that one diamond takes up on the worsted sample, and the thread count appears to be a bit higher than the worsted sample.

Looking at the three samples made me realize that there is one thing that I don't know about period twills. I don't really know the size of the diamond motifs. Does Product No. 00070 or Product No. 00030 better imitate the surface appearance of a fine period diamond twill? Without a travel budget, and an opportunity to see actual archaeological specimens, I'm not sure how to find out.

I'm inspired to see whether I can obtain samples of some modern diamond twills from some of the other companies that sell them to reenactors. Tonight, I wrote to the other companies discussed in my first post to see whether they are willing to send me swatches also. If I receive other swatches, I will scan them and post them here, so my readers can also compare them.

EDIT: I heard back from Wollstoff shortly after I sent my e-mail. It turns out that they do not ship outside the European Community. I wrote back acknowledging their policy but asking for the samples anyway, since at this point I would like to see how their fabric differs in feel, and in size of diamonds, from the ones I've collected so far!

EDIT (10/17/2016):  Reformatted post to improve layout and corrected a few typos.

The Costs of Textile Transport

Last week, I ordered a set of swatches, including diamond twill swatches, from Naturtuche. During that e-mail conversation, I asked about shipping costs.

It turns out that it will cost me 16,49 Euros (about $24.50 USD) to have up to two kilograms of fabric shipped to the US. The website says that the undyed diamond wool twill weighs about 270 g per meter. So two meters would weigh 540 g, or about half a kilogram. Still, I'd be paying nearly $25 USD for the shipping alone, on top of the 22,99 Euros (about $34 USD) per meter of fabric.

That's nearly $100 USD for two meters of wool just to make the most expensive apron dress I would ever have had--and that's before dyeing the fabric, assuming that I have the nerve to decide to do so.

At that price, I would be terrified to cut the stuff, let alone dye it--and I see no point in buying diamond twill if I'm not going to try out some fitted designs.

I need to think some more about this, and get shipping cost information from the other dealers.

EDIT: I have made small changes in the above text to make it read closer to what I meant to say, the biggest of which was to correct my comment about the price of the Naturtuche diamond twill from "over $100 USD" (with shipping) to "nearly $100 USD" (with shipping). Mental arithmetic, unfortunately, is not one of my more solid skills. :-)

Neulakko lives!

For those of my readers who follows the Finnish costuming blog, Neulakko, please be aware that the owner has had to move to a new host because her old site was hacked. Neulakko can now be found here. You can also find it through my "favorite blogs" list.

My New Spindle

For no reason I can easily explain, I recently decided that I needed to own a drop spindle, preferably one with a soapstone whorl, like some of the Viking finds.

So I bought the spindle shown in the photo from a nice neopagan who trades as Mengloth's Market. I received the spindle on Friday. Upon opening the box, I saw that the spindle I had received both was and wasn't what I was hoping for. On the plus side, the soapstone whorl is beautiful in shape, and (so far as I can tell) has good balance and spin. But the minus side is that the spindle stick is an ordinary lacquered dowel with hooks screwed on both the top and the bottom. I don't have a problem with the two hooks, since I think it will be easier to learn to spin with the hooks present, and the fact that there are hooks on both top and bottom will let me experiment with both top and bottom whorl spinning. Moreover, I have discovered by careful experiment that I can simply remove the hooks by unscrewing them, if I want to cut notches in the stick at a later date. No, the disappointing part is that the whorl appears to be glued in place. So much for my buying a spindle stick from Katrin to use with it. :-( But for better or worse, I now own a spindle.

Now that I own a spindle, I need to learn how to spin. Since I can't imagine trying to learn this craft, which requires the continuous use of two hands, from a book (that would need to be held open, and have pages turned from time to time), I went looking on YouTube for good video tutorials. Of the video tutorials I've found so far, this one by Megan LaCore and this one by Abby Franquemont appear to be the clearest and easiest to understand. Though I also enjoyed this one, titled simply and anonymously "Spinning on a Drop spindle While Arguing With my mother"; it shows what the teenage spinner is doing almost as clearly as the videos intended to be tutorials.

When I actually obtain some roving, I will sit down with one of the videos one day when I have time and energy, and see what I can manage to learn. In the meantime, if any of my readers have any suggestions 1) for tutorials to look for; 2) sources of roving, or 3) any other advice. I'm always eager to listen!

The Diamond Twill Blues

Several years ago, I searched the Web intently for wool fabric woven in a diamond twill. A number of the fabrics found in the Birka graves were fine worsteds woven in such a weave, and it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to make an apron dress out of the closest facsimile to such cloth as I could find.

The image accompanying this post is a scan--not a photograph, but an actual, full-color scan--of a fabric sample I received from a correspondent from one of my costume mailing lists who lives in the UK. She had obtained it for me from a local vendor who caters to reenactors interested in the Viking age and other early periods when such cloth was woven.

It is a beautiful piece in its way, and although I don't recall the price per meter I remember that it was rather expensive. That's to be expected, because there is little demand for diamond twills among members of the general population. But I was bitterly disappointed when I received it, all the same.

Why? Mostly because this sample is nothing like the diamond twills found in the wealthy graves at Birka and other Viking Age sites. The greatest dissimilarity is the thread count. I couldn't find a ruler marked in centimeters when I made the scan, but I remember from when I originally measured it that the thread count of this swatch of fabric is, at most, 4 or 5 threads in both warp and weft per centimeter. In contrast, virtually all of the diamond twills I have ever heard of from Viking era graves have thread counts that are more than *twice* as high. For example, in her essay on the Birka finds that was published in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe, Agnes Geiger gives the following thread count figures for the "broken 2/2 lozenge twill or diamond twill" specimens found there:

The fine quality of these worsteds is best described by the tightness of threads per centimetre in the warp and weft being respectively 28/14, 32/12, 38/14 and 46/15 in the 4-end twills and 50/17, 52/14, and 60/17 in the 3-end specimens.

(emphasis mine). Lise Bender Jorgensen, in North European Textiles Until AD 1000, which catalogs early fabric finds from all of northern Europe, notes that 2 of the diamond twill specimens found in the Valsgarde graves had counts of 20/14 and 20/18 (Appendix B at page 160). But she also notes finds of other diamond twills in other northern European countries before and during the Viking Age, none of which were as coarse as 4 threads per centimeter.

Here's a picture, from Geijer's essay, of a diamond twill from Birka. Although I do not know the scale of the photograph, it is clearly a finer textile than my modern swatch.

On the bright side, since my last serious effort to locate some for costuming purposes, it appears that at least two vendors have succeeded in findings sources for diamond twill wool fabric with more period-plausible thread counts. Handelsgillet, a Swedish web business that sells useful products for reenactors, carries four different colors of diamond twill wool fabric. They don't give thread count figures for their fabric, but they do say that each of the diamond motifs is 15 mm wide. Assuming that the proportions of the diamond motifs are the same on their fabric as they are on the coarser swatch I have, that suggests that their fabric has a thread count of roughly 15 X 15 threads per centimeter--much more in line with the diamond twills found. That's a lot less absurd for reconstructing the luxury costumes of rich Vikings than the very coarse twill I originally found would be.

On the other hand, it's clear from the pictures on the Handelsgillet site that their fabric was woven of gray and white thread, just like my swatch, and overdyed--which still gives a different effect than the grave finds which appear to be all of one color of thread, such as the specimen from Birka shown in the picture above.

This site sells wool fabric, specifically diamond twill fabric, with a (stated) thread count of 14 threads per cm. Much better, and it appears that the fabric does not have the dark thread/light thread contrast, which I have not found in pictures of period twills. At 36 euros (about $50 USD) per meter for pure white fabric (and much more for dyed wool), it's very expensive, but given the limited market for such goods, that's not surprising. Perhaps I should save up for 2 meters of the white, and think about how I might dye, and later use, that fabric.